Halton Hills Housing Update - Ep.197

Hi everyone! Welcome to this week's Halton Hills housing update. The numbers are very December this week because not a lot happened. In Georgetown this week, there were five sales and two new listings. Five sales is actually pretty good for the week before Christmas, but there has been a huge drop in new inventory. Acton, Glen Williams, Limehouse, and the rural market all had no sales this week. Acton had two new listings, Glen Williams and Limehouse had no new listings and the rural market had two new listings. Something we’ve been talking about for what feels like months now is the number of properties in the expired, terminated, etc category, and this week there were 16 properties in this category. Of the 16, 14 exited the market and didn’t return. One dropped their price and the other relisted at the same amount. Since the middle of October, we have seen properties leaving the market at a rapid rate, 10+ listings per week actually. It has completely changed our market. The main question is if these properties are going to re-enter the market in January, or are they going to wait until the spring? It will be really interesting to see because right now we are on a downward trajectory in terms of inventory and that will hopefully keep prices stable. 

So, looking at active inventory, there were 149 active listings last week. We are down to 136 listings in all of Halton Hills this week. This is a very low number compared to the 230 that we were at about eight weeks ago. We have seen almost 100 properties come off the market. It doesn’t feel like there is a massive saturation of inventory anymore and I think that over the next two weeks, our inventory will get lower and lower which means that we will go into January with relatively low inventory, which isn’t honestly something I was expecting. In Georgetown this week, we are down from 88 to 78 active listings. We were at around 140 a few weeks ago and now we’re here. In May, when it was a super active market, we were in the 50s, so we’re not far from what I would consider pretty scarce inventory in Georgetown. If you’re a buyer, there could be opportunities for you in this current market. If we keep seeing properties terminate, it will tip the scale back in the seller’s favour because there won’t be enough supply and prices will rise again. So, looking at our price points, under $800,000 is down from 19 to 13 active listings which is a big drop this week. Eight hundred thousand to a million is down from 29 to 21 active listings. It’s another big drop, and of the five sales we had last week, four of them were under one million dollars. The other one was under $1,100,000. This just shows that over a million is still very dead. One to 1.5 million is down from 30 to 27 active listings, and 1.5 million plus is down from 18 to 17. Those properties are basically exiting from the market and that’s why inventory is decreasing, it isn’t because sales are happening. It’s just really interesting to see what price points are moving because of sales and which are moving because of listings terminating. If we see low levels of inventory under $1,000,000 then we should see sales start to pick up, which will create a positive impact on the million plus price point. That is something I am going to be watching closely coming into the new year.

So looking at Acton, we remained the same this week at 21 active listings. It’s not high or low, but there are a lot of properties available under $1,000,000. You can get some great properties right now in the $700,000 - $800,000 range. Glen Williams remained the same at eight. Limehouse has no active listings again this week and the rural market is down from 32 to 29. We are seeing a lot of properties exit in the rural market. We were in the mid 40s, which was really high for the rural market. I had never seen it that high and we’re finally seeing inventory come down there. 

Overall, it’s not very surprising to see low sales. It’s just not that time of the year where we see crazy demand. Although we had some strong weeks, this is definitely more that what I would expect to see in December. The big question mark is just where inventory will land in the new year. Are we going to see properties re-entering the market? Or will they wait? If inventory continues on it’s current trend, I guarantee we are going to have a really busy Q1 because inventory will be so low. Buyer demand is down and we know that but when we don’t have a lot of inventory, it starts to fuel our market again and that’s where the numbers are going. 

So, I will be back next Tuesday! I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas!